Orzo and Mixed Summer Vegetable Sauce

Today started somewhat like yesterday. I was making the peanut milk to make the first attempt at peanut tofu and what should happen; my lid is stuck to the Magic Bullet container. It is currently in the freezer, to see if I can get the pressure inside reduced so that it will come off. However, last time this happened, it took a few days for me to get the lid off. Therefore, I now have a new Oster blender (that my fiancé was nice enough to buy for me) and the Magic Bullet will be retired. Tomorrow I should be able to make my first batch and I will have something to report tomorrow night. And I have found one way to reduce the nut pulp from this. The finer you grind the nuts, the less pulp you have in the end. But I am still going to be overrun by it.

Since I had to go to the store today and buy some more bread, I also picked up an eggplant to make the Mixed Summer Vegetable Sauce from The Mediterranean Vegan. Mine doesn’t look quite as nice as what Kmouse put up on PPK, the eggplant is cut a bit too big, but it was as good as it looked. I had it with some orzo that was sitting in the fridge as a leftover from another recipe.

I may have to take another look at this book. It may be more useful that I originally thought on first look. Even if I don’t use the recipes as written, I can take bits and pieces and use those as in other ways.

Puttanesca Scramble Variation and Salad

This has not been a good day. I went to grab my eggplant to make the Mixed Summer Vegetable Sauce from The Mediterranean Vegan and found that it had gone bad on me. Ok, I thought, plan B; I will make the Puttasesca Scramble with Bryanna Grogan’s Chickpea Chilla and a salad for dinner. So I start to make my salad, and in the process of getting the romaine head out of the bag, the other two fall out onto the floor. I have had to put way to much produce down the drain today. Not happy. I don’t like to waste food and we are too poor to really be able to do so. Like I said, not a good day.  At least the food was good.

I did take a few liberties in making the scramble. Since I had no fresh herbs, I had to use dried and all of the herbs, capers and tomatoes went in together after the garlic was finished. I also used jarred minced garlic, since I normally don’t keep whole garlic around and was unable to find any pre-sliced garlic in the store. After cooking the tomatoes and seasonings, I left about a quarter of it in the pan and then stirred in the cut up pieces of the Chickpea Chilla (which were made as normal, except for omitting the tomatoes). I then let it sit on the stove and let the omelette get hot and covered in the tomato scramble mixture. The idea worked much better than I expected.

The salad is just romaine, carrots, celery, and radishes with some Drew’s Raspberry Vinaigrette. It was just the right thing to cool my mouth off after eating a few bites of the scramble. And a cool side dish on a very hot night in Florida (we are still in summer down here).

Menu for the Week of Oct. 11

I think this will be the workaround (print screen, Microsoft Paint, save as jpeg file, upload) for putting my weekly menu online and not having to retype it. Actually I just wanted to show off my computer. As you can see above, I write my menu in OneNote. How do I do that you ask? Simple, I have a convertible laptop/slate that spends most of its time in slate mode. Much better to use when you have chronic tendonitis in my hands, as I do. Now I do type some things, such as this blog post, but my typing is limited. I hope to do more with dictation, but that is currently waiting for Windows 7.

I moved the Summer Vegetable Sauce and Vegan Mozzarella Cheese to this week, since I was unable to make them last week. I also have some scrambles I am making as well. The Chickpea Scramble is something I have wanted to try and I am taking a different take on Isa's Puttanesca Scramble from Vegan Lunch. I am making the Sweet Potato Hash from VwaV simply because it will work well with most of the main dishes for this week and the sweet potatoes in the market are decent again.

I Do Eat Sweets

If any of you have taken the time to look through some of my past posts, you would think that I live a fairly virtuous life, as far as food goes. One thing I don’t talk about a lot is sweets. And to tell you the truth, I don’t eat a lot of surgery things. Since I don’t really eat a lot, I try to no fill up on empty calories. However, I do like to have a treat every day and sometimes will make something special for a holiday. Today I want to tell you about two things I had over Labor Day weekend.

The first is this huge brownie I made and put some Coconut Bliss ice cream in between the layers. The recipe for the brownie is a clone of the No Pudge Brownie mix that I found up at Recipezaar and is vegan if you omit the egg whites. The mix even works with the single serving recipe for the No Pudge Brownie. Here I made a quadruple batch (but would have been just fine with a double or triple) and then split the brownie in half and filled it with Coconut Bliss ice cream. And I drizzled some chocolate syrup over it just to add more chocolate (I’m a chocoholic). These brownies are as dense and fudgy as the store bought mix and the ice cream was great as a filling. And just to let you know, my regular daily treat is a single brownie made with coconut milk yogurt, chocolate if I can find it.

The second is an interesting cake I found at Vegweb called a Cinnamon Roll Cake. I made this because I felt like cinnamon rolls, but don’t have the space to make them in my kitchen, so this seemed like an acceptable substitute. On top is a fudgy chocolate icing and some coconut. Just the way I used to enjoy cinnamon rolls as a kid. I altered the recipe a bit and put the cinnamon layer in the middle, since I wasn’t sure how it would work with a regular frosting, instead of a glaze. Also quite good and I really need to make this again. Maybe around Thanksgiving.

So as you can see, I do eat the sweet stuff occasionally. But like all things, I do try to keep it in moderation.

Just a reminder that I am not posting on the weekends and I will see you all back on Monday.

What to do with Leftovers

This is something we all have to deal with as home cooks. Not only leftovers from meals, but for those of us that make our own soy or nut milks, those create their own leftovers as well.

Both lunch and dinner for me were leftovers today. Lunch was a plate of the Bok Choy rice from Vegan Express (with the cashews and oranges added now). For dinner I had more Curried Orzo Salad with Mock BBQ Pork and added some peanuts to the orzo dish, just to round out the meal.

Now that I am going to start making peanut tofu, I have just discovered that I have a new leftover problem, peanut pulp. If I was making regular tofu and had a lot of okara to use I could always do what SusanV suggests at Fat Free Vegan, make cookies. Or I could do what Bryanna Grogan does at Notes From the Vegan Feast Kitchen; make Okara Parmesan or Okara Miso Pate. But I’m not, so what can I do with peanut pulp?

I may do the same thing I did with the cashew pulp I had from recently making a few batches of cashew milk. I used the pulp to make Coconut & Cashew Bread Paste from Recipezaar. But when you have up to 3 cups of peanut pulp a week that may not be enough. I faintly remember reading on other blogs and possibly up at the PPK forums that people have used the pulp for cheese spreads and as binders in other dishes. But I’m not sure how to go about that. So you tell me, what are some of our favorite ways to use up the pulp left from making nut milks? And do you have any good recipes?

Tofu Bacon

Yes, I know that title sounds strange coming from someone who doesn’t eat tofu. However that is what I had with my dinner tonight and also earlier this week. However, it was not made with regular tofu. I made it with a new product from Sunergia Soyfoods called Nufu Tofu or tofu made with peanuts. Unfortunately, I can only get the Herbed Hickory flavor here, so I decided to see how it would work as“bacon”. And I am happy to tell you that peanut tofu works quite well.

This is the plate of my tofu bacon I made on Sunday. The recipe I used is from AllRecipes. It is quite easy to make, but the marinade is more a paste than a liquid. However, it does give the tofu a definite bacon taste.

And what did I first do with the tofu bacon. Why I made TLT’s of course, using a wrap though because I was using grape tomatoes. It was good, but the next time I do this it might be easier to east if tofu bacon was cut up and mixed in with the lettuce and tomatoes.

And this was dinner tonight. I took the last of the tofu bacon and heated it up in the toaster oven. It was then put on top of the Simple Vegetable Orzo (this time seasoned only with olive oil and nooch). On the side is some steamed broccoli topped with vegan parmesan. Reheating the tofu bacon just made it better and it worked quite well with the orzo. This would make a great lunch at work as well. Can you reheat tofu bacon in a microwave?

Asian Inspired Dinner

Tonight’s dinner, if not truly Asian; definitely had all the flavors one would expect in an Asian meal. And that was with me forgetting part of the ingredients for one of the dishes.

The rice dish you see is the Bok Choy, Edamame (Green Beans), Cashew and Orange Rice from Vegan Express by Nava Atlas. This was the highlight of the meal even though I forgot to put in the orange (from a can, since I couldn’t find any Clementines at the store) and the cashews. With the oranges and cashews balancing out the teriyaki sauce and sesame oil, it would have been even better. However, it does have Bok Choy; so at least I got some leafy green vegetables with dinner.

Next to that is Mock BBQ Pork (page down till you see the recipes), which is a recipe for seitan I found over at the Vegetarian Resource Group. This is a bit different way of making gluten, because you start with plain gluten that you flavor after poaching the gluten log. After the marinating the gluten pieces, you then bake them and at that point they are ready to use. Like I said, a bit different. And I would not make these again, unless they were going into a stir fry. That seems to be the best way to eat them.

The last item I had for dinner is some broccoli. I had been planning on doing the Spicy Sesame Broccoli, also from Vegan Express, but I don’t have any more containers for the refrigerator. Since I need to use these up, I just decided to put some broccoli in the oven, to heat up with the Mock BBQ Pork and then topped them with some Gomasio, from the refrigerator. For those of you not familiar with Gomasio, it is a condiment from Japan usually used on rice in bento boxes and is salt covered sesame seeds. I used it to add some extra flavor and nutrition to the broccoli.

So that was dinner. One hit, one miss and on filler. All in all not bad